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Entrepreneurship is recognized by many as a solution to environmental and social challenges of today’s society. However, it has also been criticized since it may maintain the capitalistic demands of growth and efficiency in an unsustainable way. In this chapter, we challenge the current conception of entrepreneurship that aims for societal change by tracing what, how, where, and with whom such entrepreneurship is performed. Furthermore, we take inspiration from the idea of diverse economy by Gibson-Graham and introduce the concept of alternative entrepreneurship to explore how it takes shape, changes its contours, and both challenges and propels contemporary capitalism. In this chapter, we present three ethnographic cases of the unfolding of diverse entrepreneurial activities: (1) the case of Oria, who contributes to social justice through fair trade; (2) the case of artisan food producers who contribute to biological diversity and a rural livelihood; and (3) the case of the DiE project/NEEM NGO, which contributes to social inclusion through entrepreneurial empowerment and the development of a microcredit program. We find that the alternative entrepreneurs are not constrained by organizational forms or by a limited number of economic and non-economic activities that target societal challenges. The alternative entrepreneurs move between different organizational forms such as non-profit and for profit, as well as, undertaking business and voluntary practices to achieve societal change. Finally, we conclude that the ethnographic tracing of alternative entrepreneurship allows previously unsighted activities to become more visible and brings attention to possibilities of creatively destroying overly narrow conceptions of entrepreneurship.

This project explores tensions at the heart of the fair-trade organization Ten Thousand Villages. I investigate the ways in which this organization attempts to balance concerns of North American staff and volunteers, to care for artisans abroad, and to incorporate expansion plans in the face of challenges raised by the recession.

This chapter draws on fieldwork with stores in Toronto (2011–2012) and ongoing fieldwork (summer 2014 and 2015) with the flagship store in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

Members express continuing tension between the organization’s founding Mennonite values and the more recent orientation chosen by leadership, to compete successfully in “regular” retail space against non-fair-trade brands. Store staff and volunteers perceive Villages’ buying practices, meant to provide “fairness” to producers in the developing world, as somewhat inconsistent with the treatment of North American store employees. Corporate leadership is mainly focused on ameliorating poverty abroad, rather than framing the organization’s work in a broader social justice context, which store staff and volunteers expect.

At a time of increasing dialogue about alternative value systems that expand notions of economic worth, the fair-trade movement offers a useful model for one attempt to work within the market system to ameliorate its damages. Understanding how one organization negotiates its own competing value systems can provide useful perspective on other revaluation projects.

Conventional shopping-scapes are designed to promote a linear form of consumption. Products are moved from production systems through consumer distribution nodal points. The consumption of commodities through these points is promoted as the main, if not only, legitimate activity of shopping centres. A circular economic (CE) paradigm offers an alternative to the current model of linear consumption so that there are restorative processes to ensure products, components and materials are valued at all stages of product life (Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2013). However, this model, like its contemporary linear model, overlooks the opportunities for more socially rewarding consumption that could particularly be addressed through the shopping scape. The ByeBuy! Shop was conceived to test ideas on an alternative shopping scape to increase social engagement and reduced consumption without the use of money for exchange. Accordingly, it is used here to exemplify a CE paradigm.

Radical feminist theory and practice has actively questioned power relationships between men, women and people of color as a cornerstone of capitalist development since the 1970s while demonstrating the differential impact of such inequality generating structures and relationships on lives and bodies. Their argument about the process of social reproduction and, especially, the reproduction of labor-power both achieved through the dispossession of the female and (colonial) body and the expropriation of their work (Federici, 2004) is acutely relevant to the analysis of the consequences of the unfolding Global Financial Crisis. Yet, the crisis can be a motivating force for changing the established power relations. Using three different case studies of female initiatives aiming to counteract the imposition of neoliberal attack on their livelihoods in crisis-stricken Greece, the chapter examines how the existing experience of feminist thinking and activism from within and outside of academia, can contribute to the cultivation of affective embodied relations, and building upon the idea of “feminist solidarity” (Mohanty, 2003), in addressing the challenges of the crisis and post-crisis policies.

In Canada, companies are focusing on corporate governance as an ethical response to accounting scandals and the resulting crisis of confidence. Although, many aspects of corporate governance remain free from strict regulation, we examine the voluntary changes in the disclosures of the largest Canadian companies. We attempt to understand, through disclosure theory, discourse analysis, and structuration theory, the quality of these corporate governance disclosures. We recognize that much of the disclosure is opportunistic as companies state that they have not only complied with the non-compulsory Canadian guidelines, but have also met and exceeded the requirements of U.S. regulators. This is an important finding that supports the notion that Canadian companies do not need rules and regulations. Instead, a culture of governance is developing at the boards of large companies that encourages voluntary change. Whether this is enough to prevent future accounting scandals is a question for future research.

Purpose – To use insights from economic sociology to analyze how U.S. employment law understands and regulates the relationship between prison labor and conventional employment.

Methodology – Legal analysis of all published court opinions deciding whether federal employment laws such as the minimum wage apply to prison labor.

Findings – Courts decide whether prison labor is an “employment relationship” by deciding whether it is an “economic” relationship. Most interpret prison labor as noneconomic because they locate it in a nonmarket sphere of penal relationships. A minority of courts use a different conception of the economy, one which interprets prison labor as a form of nonmarket work.

Implications – The economic character of prison labor may be articulated using the same theoretical perspectives and analytical techniques developed to analyze family labor as economically significant nonmarket work. Doing so, however, too readily accepts the market/nonmarket distinction. Given the thoroughly social character of market work, prison labor's highly structured, institutionally specific character does not preclude characterizing it as market work, and some of its features support interpreting it as such.

In this legal context, identifying practices as economic or not, and as market or not, has concrete consequences for the actors themselves. Rather than using market/nonmarket distinctions as analytical tools, scholars might treat actors' designation of an economic practice as part of a market or not as a site of conflict, subject to institutionalization, and worthy of sociological study.